With the constant advances in computer power and the wide-spread availability of digital video formats, the entry bar for editing on a PC has dropped considerably lower than it once was. However, if you are interested in editing at a prosumer level, and let's face it, most independent filmmakers are, then rushing off to your local PC megastore and grabbing the cheapest box you can find will most-likely leave you with some disappointing results.
The type of PC you need to do effective editing largely depends on your preferred video format. In most cases if you want to edit MiniDV then you have a wider range of options available to you, for generally less money. If on the other hand, you are looking to edit uncompressed or analogue video, or work in HD or non-DV formats (e.g. MPEG-2), then you will need to invest significantly more cash.
Either way, consider the following when planning your editing station:
Firewire Support
Aka IEEE 1394, aka Sony iLink. If you want to edit DV, your PC must have Firewire ports. Unfortunately since Firewire was originally an Apple technology, many PCs do not come with it by default (although thankfully it's a lot more common than it used to be). This is not a huge problem as PCI Firewire cards are easy to come by and relatively cheap. You should be able to pick one up for under USD $50, and they are quick and easy to install. Make sure you pick a card which has been designated as "OHCI compliant" (most are), as you need this for the card to work with Windows. You should also check that your chosen firewire card is compliant with your editing software.
Hard Drives
The first consideration with hard drives for video editing is space. Video chews up disk space like it's going out of fashion (at the bottom end, DV/HDV will consume around 200 MB a minute; at the top end, uncompressed HD could be chewing up 10GB per minute). You need as much disk space as you can get your hands on, and this should be in the form of a completely separate drive (not just another partition on your OS drive). It is not recommended to edit on the same drive as your operating system.
The second consideration is the type of hard drive(s) you use for your editing. Although Ultra DMA EIDE drives are pretty quick these days, they are not suitable for video editing as they are unable to provide a consistent data transfer rate. In other words, these drives may be transferring at 10MB/sec one moment, but then drop back to 975K/sec when under a large load. This is death for video editing and will result in dropped frames and other unwanted artefacts in your images.
For your video drives you should be looking at SCSI (U180, U320, SAS), Firewire, or SATA II. Of course, these drives tend to be more expensive than standard EIDE drives (prohibitively so in the case of SCSI), but when it comes to hard drives it's very much a case of you get what you pay for. If you're budget-conscious, you should probably purse the SATA II route (opt for drives which the manufacturer says are suitable for "workstations"). Firewire drives will also be an option, but it's important to only consider drives which are specifically designated by the manufacturer as suitable for video editing. SCSI, on the other hand, will give you rock-solid transfer rates and is worth investigating if you're planning on working with HD or uncompressed video. Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) is the new emergin standard, with transfer speeds up to 6 GB/sec, but you might find that the slightly older (and therefore cheaper) U320 or U180 standards are still suitable for your needs. To run SCSI hard drives, most standard PCs require an appropriate controller card to be installed.
Finally, to give yourself maximum disk space you should consider configuring multiple drives into a RAID array. RAID allows you to create single volume across multiple disks, and can also significantly increase data transfer speeds (using Striped RAID-0 or RAID-5 configurations). Striped RAID-0 requires two or more disks and speeds up access times, but does not offer any redundancy (if one drive fails, the whole volume is corrupted). RAID-5 requires at least three disks, but offers redundancy as well as speed - if one drive fails, the remaining two will continue to function. The down side with RAID-5 is you will lose the equivalent of one drive's worth of space (when using a three-drive configuration). If you'd like to learn more about RAID, visit
RAID Explained.
Processors & RAM
For prosumer DV editing, you should have at least a Pentium 4 1.5GHz or Athlon 1 GHz CPU, and ideally at least 512MB of RAM. For HDV, get a dual-core processor and at least 1GB of RAM. For full HD and MPEG-2 editing, you'll need considerably more grunt so it's worth considering buying a custom-built workstation from companies like Dell (Precision) or IBM (Intellistation).
Operating System
Windows XP Professional or a non-home flavour of Vista, with all your drives formatted with NTFS. Windows 95/98/Me is not suitable for video editing and neither is FAT32 (since there is a 2GB file size limit for any file on a FAT32 file system). The latest version of OSX is a given if you have a Mac.
Graphics Card
Most modern graphics cards will do the job, so long as they have at least 128MB of onboard RAM and fully-support DirectDraw overlays and Open GL (for effects). However, if you are doing any moderately serious editing, you should also have a TV monitor attached to your system so that you can see your footage as it will finally appear (computer monitors tend to distort things a little), in which case you should consider a graphics card that supports multiple displays (aka "Dual Head", "Triple Head" etc). Manufacturers like
Nvidia,
Matrox and
ATI produce multi-display cards.
Video Capture Cards
If your system meets most of the criteria set out in this answer, then you probably will not need an special video capture/editing cards to edit DV or HDV. However, there are other benefits of using proprietary capture cards, such as access to real-time effects, accelerated bus speeds for transferring data between cameras/VCRs and more. And if you want to edit analogue video, HD, or MPEG-2 then you will definitely need a suitable capture card.
Although many graphics cards offer "video in" functions, these are not suitable for digital video editing, since there is usually a ceiling on quality, and the codecs they use may not be the best for the job. Companies like
Pinnacle Systems,
Canopus, and
Matrox make a range of video capture cards for different needs. If you are looking to do prosumer editing, then you should not be looking at the bottom of the range products from these companies.
Laptops
The hardware in a laptop is often very different to that found in a desktop, and sacrifices in speed need to be made to enable portability and battery conservation. For example, a Pentium 4 1GHz laptop is considerably slower than a Pentium 4 1GHz desktop. Consequently, editing on laptops is a hit and miss affair. Be absolutely sure that the laptop you intend to buy will suit your needs before shelling out your cash. The best way to do this is to only consider laptops where the manufacturer has specifically stated that they are suitable for video editing.
PC vs Mac
Arguements could range for weeks on which is a better computer to buy, but in the end it boils down to one thing: your personal preference, Bill or Steve. People who tell you that "Macs are better for editing, better for graphics, industry standard etc" are living in the past and being manipulated by Apple's extremely clever marketing. These days the two platforms are completely and utterly on par, so it simply boils down to which one you feel more comfortable with. Regardless of which route you decide to take, do not buy entry-level computers if you plan to do prosumer editing. For Macs this means no iMacs, for PCs this means anything from a computer megastore (unless the price-tag says USD $1,500 or more). Buy a G5 (or later) if you are a Macophile, buy any system that is optimised for hard-core gaming (if you prefer PCs), or a custom workstation from companies like Dell (Precision) or IBM (Intellistation).
Further Research
This answer is not intended to provide you with a definitive route to building a kick-arse editing system, but rather to make you aware of key considerations you must make as part of your planning and ultimate purchases. You should do further research yourself to determine the most appropriate system configuration for your needs. We'd also recommend checking out the great system recommendations in the Desktop Video Handbook Online at
Video Guys.
